Fighting Spam with your Email Address

From the IT Desk:
Creating the right email address is step 1 to fighting (spam).

Those of you working for a large corporation probably don't see much spam because your IT departments have you well protected by firewalls (or they should), but if you're creating your own email at gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or if you're like me who works for an organization that employs 5 people, you're going to need to be smart about creating your email address.

Spammers send gazillions of spam (nasty emails about mortgages, dirty things, pretending to be from a bank who needs to verify your bank information, etc.) to email addresses they hope exist. They could buy lists of email addresses, but that costs thousands of dollars for a few thousand emails that they can only send to once.

Instead, the smart ones send to a typical name at a typical email provider. For example: george@hotmail.com. Another example: many companies have an email set up for general inquiries, like info@companyname.com. This email address will most likely receive tons of spam simply because "info" is a very common word to have in an email address for a company. It’s logical and to the point, so why not?

Here's my proof: my old email address: katrianna@earthlink.net, got tons of spam for Russian mail order brides. I created an email specifically for registering for things online called ktspam@earthlink.net and got NO spam. This email was all over the web, but who is named ktspam? It's a jumble of words that most likely will go under the radar of someone's mind when thinking of names and commonly used words to send emails to.

At work, our info@companyname.com gets tons of spam. I created an email account for our orders (we ship educational materials) called orders@companyname.com. This email got pummeled with spam. We never use it publicly, so it's not on any lists. This means spammers know of our company name, and guessed that we'd have an "orders" email, because it's easy and logical. I quickly created a new email with jumbled letters before it (the acronym of our company), called mcaorders@companyname.com. What happened? No spam. Not one drop.

The conclusion? Sacrifice your easy-to-use name, and adopt other letters that have meaning to you. Put them in the beginning of your email address. Think of letters like your initials, (so you can remember it) but have no meaning in any other language. Otherwise, you'll get lots of offers for mail order brides and other lovely solicitations.